Mayor’s race: Savage out – for now

With just 25 first-person references, modest by his standards, sex advice columnist Dan Savage on Friday announced he has “temporarily but perhaps not terminally” suspended his tongue-in-cheek campaign for mayor of Seattle.

The announcement came on the “Slog” Web site of The Stranger, for which Savage is editorial director, most-read attraction, and principal dispenser of the “f” word.

In a sentiment shared by conventional politicians, Savage blamed “jack-booted thugs from the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission” for sending a list of complicated questions which had to be filled out and returned on April 3.

The sexpert acknowledged, “I don’t know the answer to half the questions on either form — I don’t do my own taxes for a reason — there’s no way I could fill out either one in the 26 minutes I budgeted for this.”

(The elections commission has a cobra-like tendency of striking at anything, even finding violations in the 2007 Seattle City Council campaign of its own former chairman Tim Burgess.)

The aborted mayoral campaign appears to have left Savage subdued.

The suspension announcement included only one mild obscenity — attributed to someone else — with but a single “Holy Crap!’ from the usually potty-mouthed Savage.

With a Paris Hilton-like instinct for the limelight, Savage has occasionally injected himself into government and campaigns.

He packed a gun into Seattle’s new City Hall. Covering the 1996 Iowa presidential caucuses, gay activist Savage volunteered at the headquarters of candidate Gary Bauer, a former head of the Family Research Council.

Savage sought to make Bauer sick with the flu by smearing his infectious saliva
around the headquarters.

With two serious candidates — Michael McGinn and James Donadlson — recently announcing they would challenge Mayor Greg Nickels, it is unclear how much attention Savage would have reaped in his mayoral bid.

Savage has also characterized Seattle’s December snowstorm as “fun” despite the inconvenienced it caused, especially in such areas as The Stranger’s home base on Capitol Hill.

Savage had indicated he would resign if elected, leaving the Seattle City Council to pick a new mayor.